But she did not come. And Mos’s dreams had been bad that night, and uncommonly vivid. Though he could recall only one, he could not shake the feelings it had evoked. A dream of hot, red rutting, of walking invisibly into a room and finding his wife there, fingers clawing the back of the man who thrust between her legs, gasping and moaning the way she did when Mos was with her. And he was powerless in his dream, impotent, unable to intervene or to see the face of the man that was cuckolding him. Weak and pathetic. Like that moment when Kakre had loomed over him, cowed him like a child.
He lay back down in his bed, his jaw clenched bitterly. First the Weavelord, now his own wife? Did they conspire to humiliate him? Sense told him that Laranya was probably still where he left her, still celebrating with the inexhaustible zest for life that was one of the things he loved in her. But he would never know what had gone on in those lost hours since dawn, and his dream tormented him as he waited angrily for her return.
The townsfolk of Ashiki had learned to fear the coming of the night.
Aestival Week had been a cursed time for them. There were no celebrations now. They were only a tiny community, and new to the Fault. Scholars and their families, mainly, though their personal wealth had been used to hire soldiers as guards. In the past few years, there had seemed to be more and more people fleeing to the Xarana Fault to escape the oppressive atmosphere in the cities, the sense of slowly rising tension. The Weavers’ eyes were everywhere except here, and the scholars and thinkers who had founded Ashiki had feared persecution for their radical ideas more than they feared the tales they heard of the Fault.
They had not heard the right tales.
Their arrival in the Fault had been blessed with good luck. Guided by Zanya or Shintu or both, they had happened upon a secluded vale near the east bank of the Rahn, at the foot of the great falls. Initially it had appeared to be an ill omen, a charnel-house of corpses that horrified them; but they were pragmatic people, and not superstitious, and soon they realised what had happened here and understood that it was the perfect place for a town. Here, two warring factions had wiped each other out fighting over one another’s territory, and the remainder had scattered. The land was unclaimed, and so the scholars claimed it.
They did not know the extent of their fortune. Most new arrivals in the Fault did not last a week before some other force, already well entrenched, consumed them. But the great battle had emptied the land for a mile in every direction, and they managed to create a small community unhindered and unnoticed, hiding in their picturesque vale while they built crude fortifications and homes.
This was to have been their first Aestival Week in the Fault, and despite the hardships they felt like explorers on a new frontier, and they were glad.
Then, on the second night of Aestival Week, people started to disappear.
Lulled by their apparent safety, the revellers in Ashiki had allowed their security to become lax amid the celebrations. Four people were nowhere to be found by the morning. Their absence was hardly noted at first; when it was, it was thought that they had fallen asleep somewhere, drunk. By nightfall, their families and friends were concerned, but the rest of the town were not worried enough about a few missing people to curtail their festivities. In all probability they had simply gone off to find themselves a place to couple or to get a much-needed break from the community at large. It was not unknown.
That night, six people disappeared. Some of them from their beds.
This time the town took notice. They sent out search parties to comb the surrounding area. When they returned, they were two men short.
Now, as night came on the fourth day of Aestival Week, nobody slept. The silent demons and spirits that were stealing them away had made them mortally afraid, and they clustered in their houses or hid behind their stockade walls and dreaded what the dawn might bring. They did not know that their demon had done its work, and departed now. It had all the victims it needed.
The entity that Kaiku knew as Asara brooded in a cave, still wearing the shape of Saran Ycthys Marul. Kaiku would not have recognised him, however. He was massive and swollen, his skin a webwork of angry red veins that hung loosely off him in folds as if all the elasticity had gone out of it. His strict Quraal clothes lay discarded at his side, next to a different set of clothes that he had stolen for the purpose of his new guise. The once-muscular body was grotesque and sagging now, spilling over his folded knees. His eyes were filmed with white and speckled with shards of dark iris which floated freely around in myopic orbs. The components of his body were breaking themselves down, reordering themselves in a genetic dance of incredible precision, changing bit by bit to ensure that all functions kept working while the miracle of metamorphosis occurred. He was altering his very structure, being reborn within his own skin.
The cave was dank and pitch-black, well hidden. By firelight, it would have been a small, pretty grotto, dominated by a shallow pool surrounded by stalagmites, its walls glinting with green and yellow mineral flecks. But he had lit no fire, for he needed no heat. He had chosen the cave for its inaccessibility, and had made sure it was well away from any settlement in the Fault. It reeked of a choking animal musk. The occupant had been killed and removed by Saran a few days ago, but the stink would serve to keep other animals away. He had barricaded the entrance with stones, to be sure.
In the days it would take him to change, he was vulnerable. His muscles had already wasted to the point where he could barely move. He was effectively blind and deaf. Alone in the dark, there was only the gradually slowing tide of his thoughts to keep him company, decelerating towards the hibernation state in which he would spend the bulk of his transformation.
What thoughts still swirled around in the bottom of his mind were bitter dregs.
Asara had taken on the body of Saran Ycthys Marul with entirely innocent intentions. It had been a necessary guise to facilitate her mission in Quraal. Under the rigidly patriarchal Theocracy, women were not allowed to move between provinces without special dispensation, and foreign women were not even allowed to set foot in the country. Taking on the form of a Quraal male was the only realistic way of performing any kind of investigation there. It was distasteful to her, but not entirely unpleasant. She had spent a few years as a man before, during her years of wandering and searching for the sense of identity that had ever eluded her. This time around, she found she was better accustomed to it, and she fit easier in her own skin. Still, she could not help sometimes feeling that she was acting as she thought a man should, rather than the behaviour coming naturally to her. Such moments manifested themselves as moments of grandiose gravity or flair that, unbeknownst to her, seemed somewhat forced and ridiculous.
He had kept the guise for that last visit to Okhamba. Partially it was because he had got used to it, but it was also because it would be easier to gather men for a dangerous trip if he himself was a man: there would be no tiresome issues of gender, whether in preparation for the journey or during it. Men were apt to either feel disdain towards a woman who sought to risk herself – thinking arrogantly that she was trying to measure up to a man by doing so – or they felt protective, which was worse. They were as predictable as night and day.
But there was another, more important reason. To effect a change of his entire body meant that he was forced to glut himself, to steal the breath and the essence of others until he was gorged to the limit of endurance. The forge of change, the organ that he felt nestling between his stomach and spine – which he imagined as a coil, though he really had no anatomical comparison to draw against – had to be stocked with fuel enough to keep it burning throughout the metamorphosis. That required many lives of men and women.
Not that Saran felt guilt about taking what he needed. He had long since learned that he was unable to feel more than a passing regret in killing, no more than a butcher would in slaughtering a banathi. But he had lived to eighty-six harvests by being careful, and a dozen deaths in quick succession would always arouse terror
and suspicion among the survivors. Sometimes they thought it was a mysterious plague, the Sleeping Death that they had heard of, for his victims were found dead without a mark on them as if they had simply stopped breathing; but other times, they sought a scapegoat, and if they found him in mid-transformation, they would tear him apart.
Usually he did not change his whole body any more than he absolutely had to. But this time was an exception.
A violent loathing had taken him. This form, this skin, was tainted now. Saran Ycthys Marul would be sloughed away, and with it perhaps some remnant of the responsibility for the memories it bore.
How could he have known that they would send Kaiku to meet him? Of all people, why her? Though they had been separated for five years, the same cursed attraction existed between them in whatever form he took, and now it was strengthened by the simplicity of being between man and woman. He wished he had never saved Kaiku’s life now. It had exacted a heavy price on one who prided himself on his utter independence.
Yet for a time, he had believed that fortune had turned his way. Why tell her? he had thought. He did not owe her the knowledge. It was his prerogative to change his identity whenever he pleased, and he did not feel that he was betraying a trust if he chose to lie about his past. Then, after Kaiku had told him what she thought of Asara, his mind had been made up. Better to begin again. Kaiku would never have to know.
And then came the time, the moment of joining; but his body betrayed him as Asara’s had done before him. The desire to take her, to be inside her, was stronger than the act of making love could satisfy. At a primal level he wanted to consume her, to reclaim the lost part of himself and to assimilate her very being in the process. Once again, he had lost control.
Now he had ruined everything. He knew Kaiku too well: she was as stubborn in her grudges as in everything else. She would not forgive him, ever. His deception, which had seemed justifiable at the time, now seemed abhorrent when mirrored through Kaiku’s eyes. What a pitiful vermin he was, taking on shapes to reinvent himself over and over, to erase past mistakes with different faces. A being with no core, and no soul, stealing his essence from others, vapid inside.
He had gone to Cailin, and they had spoken of a new task for him, one that would require him to take a new form. He was only too glad to take it.
He could bear himself no longer. It was time to change.
Zaelis found Lucia sitting with a young boy her own age in the lee of a rocky jut that protruded from the side of the valley. It was midday, and Nuki’s eye was fierce overhead, pummelling the world in dazzling light. Lucia and the boy lay in what little shade the rock provided, he on his back, she on her belly reading, kicking her legs absently. Several small animals busied themselves nearby, strangely nonchalant in their activities: a pair of squirrels dug for nuts, darting quickly about but never straying far; a raven prowled up and down the jut like a lookout; a black fox sat worrying at its brush, glancing back occasionally at the two adolescents who lounged under its protection.
Zaelis halted for a time, watching them from downslope. His heart softened at the sight. It was like a painting, a moment of childhood idyll. Lucia’s posture and manner were more girlish than he had ever seen. As he thought this, she turned to the boy and said something about the book she was studying, and he burst into explosive laughter, startling the squirrels. She grinned at him in response; a carefree, genuine smile. Zaelis felt gladdened, then suddenly sad. Such moments were too rare for Lucia, and now he came to ruin it for her. He almost turned back then, resolving to talk to her later; but he reminded himself that there was more at stake than his feelings or hers now. He limped up the hill towards them.
He knew that boy, he realised, as he got closer. His name was Flen; the son of one of the few professional soldiers that the Fold possessed. His father was a Libera Dramach man. Zaelis remembered meeting him once or twice. Of all the people that Lucia spent her time with, Flen was the one she preferred; or so his informers told him, anyway. Caution had driven him to keep a watch on the former Heir-Empress’s activities as she grew.
He found himself disliking the boy already. He had warned Lucia against making her abilities overt, for fear of revealing herself. Even though nobody knew the Heir-Empress of Blood Erinima was even alive, much less the strange affinity with nature that she bore, it was too great a risk. Yet she did not conceal them around Flen. Only Flen. Out of all her friends, what made him special?
Careful, Zaelis, he told himself. She is fourteen harvests old now. No longer a little girl. No matter what you may prefer to think.
Flen noticed him then, though the animals – and hence Lucia – had spotted him a long time ago. They did not scatter as animals should, but held their ground with a peculiarly insolent air.
‘Master Zaelis,’ he said, getting to his feet and bowing swiftly in the malechild fashion, hands linked behind his back.
‘Flen,’ he replied, with a mere dip of his head. ‘May I have a private word with Lucia?’
Flen glanced at Lucia as if to seek her approval; it irritated Zaelis inexplicably. But she was still reading her book as if neither of them were there.
‘Of course,’ he said. He seemed about to say some words of farewell to Lucia, but then decided against it. He walked away hesitantly, unsure of whether he should stay nearby or leave, and then made a decision and struck out towards the town.
‘Daygreet, Zaelis,’ Lucia said, not looking up. It was the first time they had met today, for she had left the house before he had awoken, making the pleasantry an appropriate one.
He sat down next to her, his damaged leg out straight before him. He could manage the traditional cross-legged position when he needed to, but it made his knee ache. His eyes wandered over the puckered and grooved skin on the nape of her neck, the appalling burn scars revealed by her short hair. She looked up at him over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes against the glare of the sun, and waited expectantly.
Zaelis sighed. Talking to her was never easy. She gave so little back.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said casually. ‘And you?’
‘Lucia, you should really be using a more formal mode by now,’ he told her. Her language had subtly evolved into a hybrid of girl-child form and woman-form, which was usual for adolescents as they became embarrassed about using a diminutive mode and began to copy adults; but the dialect she had picked up from the mass of influences among the people of the Fold did not seem appropriate for the child of an Empress.
‘I am quite capable of adopting a far more elegant mode, Zaelis,’ she said, in crisply elocuted, chilly syllables. She sounded eerily like Cailin. ‘But only when I need to,’ she finished, reverting to her usual style.
Zaelis abandoned that line of conversation. He should never have brought it up.
‘I see you have been communicating with the wildlife of the valley again,’ he said, indicating the black fox, which glared at him.
‘They come to me whether I talk to them or not,’ she said.
‘Does this mean that you are well recovered from your incident with the river spirits?’ he asked, absently running his knuckles over his close-cut white beard.
‘I told you I was,’ she replied.
Zaelis looked out across the valley, framing his next sentence; Lucia, surprisingly, spoke up first.
‘You want me to try again,’ she said. It was a flat statement.
Zaelis turned back to her, his expression set as a grim affirmative. There was no point evading it; she was far too incisive.
Lucia got up and sat cross-legged, arranging her dress over her knees. She seemed so tall and slender suddenly, Zaelis thought. Where was the little girl he had tutored, the little girl he had built a secret army around?
‘It will do no good,’ she said. ‘What happened on the river has been forgotten now, at least by any spirits that I could contact.’
‘I know that,’ said Zaelis, although he really hadn’t for s
ure until Lucia told him. ‘But something happened there, Lucia. I sent spies to investigate, after what happened to you. The river towns are talking of nothing else.’
Lucia studied him with her fey blue eyes, her silence prompting him to continue.
‘A barge was destroyed on the Kerryn,’ he said, shifting himself awkwardly. ‘Carrying explosives, apparently, and they must have gone off and blown it to pieces. But there were . . .’ He hesitated, wondering if he should share this with her. ‘There were bits washed up, bits of the people that had been on the barge. That, and bits of other things. That barge was carrying something when it exploded, and it wasn’t human.’
Still Lucia did not speak. She knew he was getting to his point.
‘Cailin believes that things are building to a head. The failing crops, Blood Kerestyn’s armies, Saran’s report, the thing you sensed on the river, the Weavers in the Fault. I have grown to believe her. We have little time left.’
He intentionally left out the revolt in Zila, though intelligence had reached him long ago about that. He tried to keep the doings of the Ais Maraxa as far from Lucia’s ears as possible.
He laid a hand on his adopted daughter’s knee. ‘I have come to realise that we have no clear idea of what we are truly facing, and ignorance will kill us. We have to know what is going on now,’ he said. ‘We have to know what we are dealing with. The source of all of this.’
Her heart sank as she felt the inevitability of what was to come.
‘Lucia, we need you to tell us. To go to Alskain Mar, contact one of the great spirits. We need to know about the witchstones.’ He looked pained as he said it. ‘Will you do it?’
You are not a pawn here. Kaiku’s words came back to her then, spoken on the first day of Aestival Week. But they seemed hollow, brittle under the weight of necessity. She knew in her heart that she was not capable of a meeting of minds with a spirit such as dwelt in Alskain Mar, and that she would be placing herself in grave danger by trying; and yet, how could she refuse? She owed her life to Zaelis, and she loved him dearly. He would not ask her if it was not a matter of utmost importance.
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 63